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I was thinking of how seldom I am conscious of depth, when writing; usually, it is just surface, style, syntax, structure and shape, I explicitly think of expressively (and remember I shape to express the energy of speech that does not belong on the page), but there are many opportunities to generate both figuration and diction that draw from writing. Take them! In the following test, words 1 (Bunting), 4, 6 (similar sort of poorness) and 8 (a figure – I was thinking of beauty regimes as a butterfly – vaguely thinking of Olson, then aligning its tongue with ‘lashes). I need to read more!

Curved

For low abrupt flight
petal purchase, proboscis
tong.

I was trying a few different things on some of my little verses. Seems as if it is impossible to meaningfully shape these poems to express my own energy: then, it is as if absolutely arbitrary where to “chop up” the poem. Expression is a useful word, and difficult to get around, at least without random processes and kitsch. It makes sense, from what I understand about expressive processes in art in general, that expressing ones own energies is abstract enough to be meaningless (given one expresses affect, in general). Nevertheless, it’s the energy of the poem that should stand out, I feel.

1. Shaping for energy seems to make diction so.
2. Shaping to express the energy of the poem seems to make cadence so.

That seems fairly self explanatory, if not “correct”, but it raises the question which to learn with, or from, first. I would suppose (2), with the goal of reaching (1), at which point expression might fall to the necessity of the world’s fragments (which is a fine enough means to restate my blog’s continued babble).

I have his collected poems, and I flick through it now and again, trying really just to stem my bafflement.

To utter the speech that belongs there

‘Blue Sonata’

making a poem fit to the occasion of its writing, literary and kitsch (Greenberg’s faked sensations): “To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass… And I am lost without you.” (‘They Dream Only of America’). Ashbery’s post modern use of high and low art is satisfying: it is not clear whom he is lost without, even-though each part of that short poem is perhaps disorientated, along with the allusions of the former line.

I’d suppose that the speech of my own poems belongs elsewhere, ideally to ideologically undo high and low orders.

I think that Ashbery’s poetry is great when America is kitsch (and his poetry folds that into the occasion), which might explain how he can even exist alongside LANGUAGE (poetics).

I was enjoying a lot about this collection, and I was going to remark that I was puzzled by the use of Blake and that perhaps Fisher was trying to link physics to Blake’s poems and heterodox religious views (even the music of Brixton to Blake’s art), but I got to here and the pun with ‘lead’ (gasoline) and then that all collapsed.

How they purchase will depend on their choice of food
Huge profits from ‘Landspeed’
Started with anecdote lead on conservative angst
Destruction of flora in a circle unexplained.
Splintered beauty
A kid hops the walkway,
says two elves can beat a wolf, and repeats it
Behind the front, a row of trees and flowers.

The italic quote is from Investors Chronicle (the book, ‘Gravity’, helpfully lists quotations), and while I still enjoy the use of syntactically coherent collage, I am very puzzled by how much it has lost me. Perhaps it’s something to do with neo-modernism’s relation to exclusion via parody, but that’s a random guess. But then I return to it, and though some of the materials seem forced, e.g. Pound quotations, there is an utmost tenderness to the language, so yes.

I am not reading (nor writing) enough to warrant keeping it, but hey.

1. the general feature of my verse would I hope be classed as a sort of calm or tranquil variable foot.
2. Zukofksy writes to music rather than himself, but he misses history (or rather we do so now: at the time he may not have been in the control group); Olson’s speech misses that music; LANGUAGE ignores both of those blinds, and so lifts poetry outside of itself, which all contemporary poetry has to free itself from, be a language uncataylsed by those blinds or noise, in e.g. an anti-habitual poetic.
3. what is good in poetry is mastery of technique, and when pushed to its limits that ceases to exist, in e.g. conviction in the poem becoming apathy.

These points don’t fit together obviously, but I guess that’s why the blog exists.

I was talking to a poet, about truth value, and he was saying that the truth value of e.g. an advert is who made it and how it sells (I paraphrase from memory). I would be more inclined to think of it as audience based (what needs it generates in you), though I might still ask if some audience is truly privileged: and maybe that second moment is what is meant? Who is this for?

Maybe that’s what the failure of critical theory is all about: being for the connoisseur is the only truth that exists.

Personally, I’d think – and hope – my poems incorporate the rejection of closure, rather than an attitude against my own confessional narrative, but it’s a close call. I plump for the former hopefully not because I’m mad but because I’d hope that its ghosts are not mine.

I guess that’d be where the truth gets in: a sort of turning inside out – into autonomy – of poetry for yourself.

So maybe everyone starts out writing for themselves, and then stuff happens, they have an audience or somehow revolt against that in whatever way, and that’s why we do it.

I think if they stand up musically then I can say it’s both an attitude and a rejection of narrative closure.

Red

For awkward cleft in
diadem moon gleams. She
partakes in blooming earth
with roots in dew.

Romantic, but awkwardly so and therefore distinctively in voice, but there are many ways to write the same poem. So then shaping for energy (which makes sense):

Moon

Gleams in awkward cleft to
diadem partakes in dew loose
earth roots bloom.

I would add that truth content, being negative, is a criticism of whom the artwork is for.

Leafe Press, a good small underground modernist press, are publishing a pamphlet of my poems, 1/, tests. I am pleased with it: don’t steal this (non) book!

I won’t write up the series of blogged moves I’ve made to get here, though I don’t think any of them are inconsistent; it would be junk.

However, I would have thought that the absence of the world’s existence from a poem that it is in shows the poem is false: not the world. Then a nomadic suspension of a grotesque (with the fullness of life) world might grant the poem an everyday status that actually only exists outside it, so that any collage – as appropriation of the everyday – is ironic and only gives the appearance of life.

So I’d end up with a sort of inorganic and false fragment, though probably not in an interesting way.

Claims

I was trying to smooth the ghost of meter, based on the the following motivations a) it is nomadic (deconstructive of its artlessness) by postponing the grotesque (uptodate), and so possibly sublime, world b) it removes noise from the equation so that poem is meaningful c) it relates to projective verse.

All well and good or not, but perhaps one should neither postpone the world, nor make/write the world as a grotesque thing, unless narrative is fragmented. So I will go on with collage: smoothing the grotesque to open an ontological hole in the life of a poem that is ontically the fragmented world that leaks in.

Test results

If you smooth out the interplay of ictus with beat, meter with rhythm, and then collage the fragments a) if unstressed syllables are equally timed, then the verse is doggerel, has no life to it, and b) it creates a mood per the relaxed tonal rhythms of The Waste Land.

Conclusion

Writing fragments at distance might be work.

Lovely 22 page 20 poem collection on Bad Betty Press. What struck me quickest was the visual nature of its flirtation with light verse, despite circumventing imagism (the language is more compressed than it is concise)

The purple sea urchins are not to blame

first line of the first poem, ‘Orphans’

and how they and the language foreshadow the poetess and her art

We had everything:
water, honey, each other.
Some glaciers were left,

‘Letter from the Past’

which seems to me just as visual, just as the species foreshadow human concerns. Those four points work out for me extremely satisfactorily, even while a line or triangulation from them might seem rudimentary.

I would want to know that Konig is a biologist (there is no mention of this in the 5 line biography); the only long poem is a found poem titled ‘Potter’s Field, Hart Island Archive’:

Plot 175
Female Unknown, age 25, buried for 33 years.

There is a depth to its simplicity that belies the obvious allusion to Reznikoff. I am intrigued how a more careful reading might wind these deaths into the rest of the poems.

I think the shadow is music, which I personally feel may be too thickly textured in the wrong places (IMPERSONALITY), but is far from displeasing otherwise, if only due to the sense of content disappearing (into Konig?). The last line, like the movement of the collection as a whole, is difficult to place: perhaps Gluck

The waves blinked
a last invitation.

So I Could, So I Did

and the title of the closing poem sits well, both its playful inversion of expectation and its person.